Lime farmer and gang foe Hipolito Mora (left) is running for Mexico's Congress as an independent.

(Alfredo Corchado -
Staff
)

CUITZEO, Mexico — Hipolito Mora is running for Mexico’s Congress in elections Sunday, but he’s not a typical candidate.

Mora, a lime farmer, is a high school dropout who helped lead a civilian armed uprising against criminal gangs two years ago and ended up in prison. He was released, only to witness the killing of his son in a shootout with vigilante rivals. Now he’s giving politics a try, embracing a message he hopes will make a difference: Change comes through ballots, not bullets.

“I made a promise to my son that one way or another I would continue fighting for a better Mexico,” he said. “This is my opportunity.”

Mexico holds midterm elections Sunday for nine state governors, 300 mayors, 500 members of Congress and 17 state legislatures. For the first time, candidates can run without being affiliated with a political party, following election reforms enacted last year, opening the way for nontraditional candidates like Mora.

But intense violence in many regions has cast a cloud over the election. Seven of Mexico’s 31 states are on high alert. Thousands of troops and federal authorities are patrolling streets in the western state of Michoacán, where Mora is running, as well as in neighboring Jalisco and Guerrero, and in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, two states bordering Texas.

5 candidates slain

The grim national panorama isn’t what the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto has sought to portray to the world. Instead, he has tried to deliver a happy narrative of a can-do nation brimming with economic promise, with homicides on the decline. But those statistics remain in dispute, and rates for other crimes, like kidnapping and extortion, are still high.

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At least 70 incidents of violence have occurred in Mexico’s current election campaign season, according to the Reforma newspaper, and at least five candidates have been slain. Others have said they are too afraid to campaign. Election officials have said they cannot set up ballot stations in some areas, including Guerrero state, where high tensions followed the disappearance of 43 college students abducted by police and allegedly slaughtered by a drug gang last September.

The head of Mexico’s National Electoral Institute, Lorenzo Cordova Vianello, is in trouble after an illegally recorded audio of him ridiculing indigenous people was leaked online.

Fifty percent of eligible voters are expected to turn out, but that number is considered low for Mexico, where voters are losing faith in the main political parties, said analyst Jaime Rivera, a political scientist at the University of Michoacán in Morelia.

“Voters believe less and less in political parties, but they still want to believe in their institutions,” said Rivera, who is also a state electoral adviser. “That’s why this election is so important, not just because of what’s at stake, but because of the very essence of hope that institutions can still work for the common voter.”

The June midterm elections usually serve as a referendum for the current presidential administration halfway through its six-year term. The fact that independent candidates can run may be key; in an opinion poll carried out by the lower house of Congress this year, 75 percent said they had little or no confidence in any political party. The margin of error was 3.9 percentage points.

In Nuevo León state, which borders Texas, Jaime Heliodoro Rodríguez Calderón, a blunt-speaking businessman nicknamed El Bronco, is regarded as one of the few independent candidates with a chance of winning a governorship.

A longtime member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, Rodríguez is a former mayor in suburban Monterrey who stared down the Zetas cartel, survived two attempts on his life, lost a son in a car chase and had a daughter briefly kidnapped. Vague on proposals, he’s nevertheless leading where it matters most, in polls, ahead by as many as six points. But the road is long and perilous for independent candidates, who are barred from receiving generous campaign financing. Rodríguez has had to turn to social media to spread the word (he has more than 460,000 followers on Facebook) and collects donations at campaign stops.

“The probable victory by El Bronco in Nuevo León reveals that the political system is tired and the future is filled with surprises,” author Jorge Zepeda Patterson wrote in Spain’s El Pais.

Corruption’s taint

Peña Nieto and his PRI party were voted in three years ago in large part because of concerns over violence. But those concerns remain intact as public opinion has soured on every political party, including the conservative National Action Party, the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, as well as the PRI and the president himself. All have been tainted with allegations of corruption. In a February poll by Reforma, some 85 percent said they don’t trust Peña Nieto, and 60 percent say corruption has increased since he took office. The president has been questioned over houses built for his family by a government contractor.

Still, analysts expect the PRI to keep the upper hand in these elections as it turns out its large base.

Meantime, violence spreads. Last month, 43 people were killed near the border between the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, one of the deadliest confrontations in recent memory. The gunbattle between security forces and suspected cartel members followed two deadly clashes in the area controlled by the powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel, a gang blamed for an ambush that killed 15 state police officers in April and for a May 1 attack in which a rocket launcher shot down an army helicopter, killing eight soldiers.

“It’s hard to believe in anything anymore,“ said José Contreras Paz, a cab driver in Guadalajara, as he maneuevered through burning debris. The debris was left after gang members erected dozens of blockades — 39 — that shut down parts of the state of Jalisco. “I pray every morning that I return home in one piece,” he said.

Next to Jalisco is Michoacán, a major source of of migrants living in the United States, including North Texas. It’s also a major source of produce — avocados, limes, grapefruit — and a center for organized crime. That’s what led Mora, who owns about 10 acres of lime trees, and other farmers to form vigilante forces in 2013 to combat criminals. Mora, a former migrant worker in California’s central coast, is now a candidate for the federal Congress, a role he said he reluctantly agreed to take on, noting he doesn’t stand much of a chance of winning.

“I don’t wear a [expletive] suit,” he said proudly, looking at his sandals and cream-colored shirt opened from the top. “I’m not one of those [expletive] rats. … I’m not one of those sons of [expletive] who lives a privileged life paid for by the people. I am from the people who rose up in arms and now wants to give this election a chance.”